The Month in Live Jazz: 5 Standout Shows

By GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
DEC. 31, 2017

The true way to experience improvised music is live. More than in most other art forms, jazz’s big discoveries and developments have historically happened onstage: The music’s creation depends on an engaged, participating audience. With that in mind, we’re starting this column, recapping the most outstanding live jazz performances I’ve seen over the past month. I’m hoping that it will offer some clues as to where jazz is headed these days — and maybe even encourage you to go out and hear it for yourself.

Wandering Lines

BORDERLANDS TRIO The Jazz Gallery, Dec. 8

Think of Borderlands Trio as an all-star team of should-be jazz luminaries. The group looks and feels like a standard jazz trio, but the air it breathes is a little different. That much is apparent on “Asteroidea,” its engrossing debut album of free improvisations, released in October. Stephan Crump, the bassist, is the collective’s de facto leader, though the pianist Kris Davis and the drummer Eric McPherson play equally important roles.

On the first evening of a two-night run at the Jazz Gallery, they played a series of long immersions, guided by Mr. McPherson’s steadily locomotive drumming and the oozing agility of Mr. Crump’s bass. At one point, Mr. McPherson, using brushes, carried the trio into a big, circular groove — something evoking passage and duration. Mr. Crump found his way into a minor pattern that climbed high before falling hard on the root note; Ms. Davis played the role of disrupter, hammering one broken-glass chord in double and triple and quadruple hits. The whole thing had the illusion of a pattern or a stream, but it resisted symmetry: If they were tracing some borderline, it was running through wild and uncharted terrain.

A Bassist Steps Forward, Coyly

HARISH RAGHAVAN The Owl, Dec. 10

Halfway through his set on a blustery Sunday night at this Brooklyn bar-cum-performance parlor, the bassist Harish Raghavan paused to identify his band mates — but not the compositions he’d just played. “Most of these songs don’t have names,” he told the small, packed room. Then, with a wry smile, he added that he wasn’t really looking for suggestions. If anyone had a particularly great idea, he said, “Find me on Facebook.” Then he explained the joke: He doesn’t use social media.


To those in the know, Mr. Raghavan is one of the most exciting young bassists in jazz, but he’s also one of the most private. That made his performance at the Owl all the more intriguing. He played six original compositions with a sturdy, quicksilver quintet: Immanuel Wilkins on alto saxophone, Joel Ross on vibraphone, Taylor Eigsti on piano and Jeremy Dutton on drums. The tunes mostly pivoted on cycles of major harmony and intertwined polyrhythms, in which everyone played a part. The low-key M.V.P. was Mr. Ross, a slight player in his early 20s whose vibraphone was sometimes like a spray of confetti, erupting in brilliant bursts; elsewhere he took solos that had the slightest tug of swing, leaning against the locked-in syncopation of the rhythm section.

read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/31/arts/music/live-jazz-harish-raghavan-thomas-morgan-john-zorn.html